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“You won’t help me?”
“I’m not a theologian. Call up Father Julian.”
“Evil people are about to hurt him.”
“Mark Shondell?” I said.
“Don’t speak to me about the Shondells.”
“You were at his house,” I said. “Marcel LaForchette saw you there.”
“I will not discuss this.”
“You worked for him. Why denounce him now?”
“Don’t tempt me, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“Then don’t be a hypocrite.”
“Be gone with you,” he said.
“Did you kill Firpo?”
“I kill no one. They kill themselves.”
“That’s a lie,” I said.
“I can do you great injury.”
“The words of a bully,” I said. “I thought better of you.”
His skin and the scales on it were luminous with an oily sweat. He raised his hand as though to strike me. I knew I was in mortal danger but could not move. Suddenly, Gideon and the galleon and the poor devils on it disappeared, and I was on the bank, deep in the shadow of the live oak, the air dank and cold and throbbing with frogs.
I walked home like a drunk man and woke in the morning facedown on the couch, my clothes on, the soles of my shoes rimmed with mud.
* * *
IT WASN’T EASY to tell Helen Soileau all this, but I did. As she listened, she flicked a ballpoint pen in a circle on her ink blotter. She had started her career as a meter maid at NOPD and had ended up my partner in Homicide in New Iberia. I believed several people lived inside Helen, both male and female, all of them complex. She was a good cop and a brave and loyal friend but also mercurial and sometimes violent.
After I finished, she propped her cheek and chin at an angle on her palm, as a teenager might. “There are a couple of things that bother me about your account, bwana. Number one, you said this character Gideon mentioned Vietnam and calling for air support.”
“That’s right. He knew things about me he could have no knowledge of.”
“But he used a phrase I’ve heard you use before: ‘Did he smile upon his work to see?’ Where’s that from?”
“William Blake’s poem about the nature of evil.”
“You and Gideon read the same books?”
“That’s a possibility,” I said.
“The other part that bothers me is you say you walked home like a drunk man.”
“I haven’t been drinking, Helen.”
“When was your last drink?”
“Nineteen months ago.”
